For some time, I’ve been working on a long, long project based on my parents’ World War II correspondence. My mom, Judith, and dad, Eugene, met on New Year’s Day 1945 when Dad was home in New York City on leave from the army for the holidays.
Mom’s parents were married on 1 January 1920, so they held a combination New Year’s Day/anniversary party every year at their home in Trenton, New Jersey. It was mostly for my future grandparents’ friends and my grandfather’s business associates, but Mother was encouraged to invite a friend of her own so she wouldn’t be the only young person in the house.
Mom, who’d graduated from college in September 1944, was doing social work out of the Trenton Chapter of the American Red Cross with servicemen and -women who were far away from their homes. At a naval air field in Trenton, she met a young WAVE ensign from New York City named Clarice, known as Kris. Kris and my mom were only a month apart in age, and they became friends.
Mother invited Kris to be her guest at the party. A few days before the party, Kris called her friend and explained that her big brother was home from the army and had nowhere to go on New Year’s Day and asked if she could bring him to the party. My mother and her parents gladly agreed.
When Kris arrived at my grandparents’ house in Trenton, she was accompanied by a nice-looking young man with blue eyes and wavy blond hair (although, being on active duty at the time, he probably had his hair cut pretty short).
Do I have to say that Kris’s brother was, in fact, my future father? That party, Monday afternoon, 1 January 1945, my future grandparents’ 25th wedding anniversary, was when my parents met. My mother-to-be had turned 21 on 7 April 1944; my future father had celebrated his 26th birthday on 5 November 1944.
Well, Dad was smitten immediately—and Mother reciprocated. They spoke by phone over the next week, Dad in New York City with his parents and Mom in Trenton with hers, until Dad left on Sunday, 7 January, to return by train to duty as commander of the headquarters battery of an artillery battalion at Camp Hood in Killeen, Texas.
On a stop-over in St. Louis the next day, he began writing to Mom and the letters continued until Dad got out of the army and came home at the beginning of December. (Mom and Dad were married in January ’46. I came along 11 months later.)
They both kept the letters they received and after they were married, Dad had them mounted and bound. (I don’t know this, but it’s fun to imagine that Dad presented Mom the bound letters on their first anniversary—the “paper” anniversary.) I reread the letters—there are 182 pieces of correspondence in the two leather scrapbooks—after my mother died in 2015 (with long breaks for other activities) and began writing about them.
Most of what’s interesting to me in reading the letters are what they reveal about my family and what was going on on the home front at the end of the war (Mom, the Red Cross volunteer social worker in Trenton), and in the army and at the European battle front (Dad, of course, the combat artilleryman). To reflect this, I’ve entitled the project “Letters from the Fronts.”
In one instance, however, I did make a little, private discovery I hadn’t expected. Now that I’ve set the circumstances, I’m going to relate the surprise discovery I made maybe a fourth of the way into the collection. For me, it’s one of the most remarkable coincidences of which I can conceive.
In mid-March 1945, I came to an undated letter Mom had sent Dad. He’d sailed for Europe with his artillery battalion on 27 February—almost two weeks earlier—but Mom didn’t know that. She knew that Dad’s deployment was imminent, but the battalion’s departure was kept classified until after it arrived in France on 11 March. The unit had been restricted to and no passes were issued in the last week before the troop ship sailed, and communication with the civilian world had been cut off.
Dad’s unit had traveled from Texas to New York by train between 2 and 7 February and then they were billeted in a transit camp in Rockland County, New York, for almost three weeks. For most of that time, my future parents were able to meet in New York, 27 miles south, or Trenton, 88 miles southwest, whenever Dad wasn’t occupied with duties, which were few most of the time as the battalion waited to board their ship for Europe.
Mom had planned to see Dad off at the ship when the time came, to have a farewell at dockside. That never happened.
In the March letter, Mom said she’d spent the weekend, the 10th and 11th, in New York City, visiting with her “uncles, aunts, and cousins.” (My mother was born in New York—as were her parents—but her family moved to Trenton when she was little. There were still a lot of relatives in the city, however, so my mom and her family often used to travel there for entertainment, shopping, family events and visits, and holidays.)
While in the city, Mom took the opportunity to take care of “something I’d wanted to do long ago”: buy Dad “a ‘farewell’ gift.” She explained that she’d wanted to give Dad the gift in person—I imagine at that unrealized parting on the dock—“but there were so many confusing mix-ups connected with your leaving I never was able to attend to anything.” So, she sent it to him, not yet knowing—though she suspected by then—that Dad had been shipped out.
Mom elucidated:
I noticed you weren’t wearing one of those identification bracelets – because you didn’t like them or because you just never had one I don’t know. However, I like them, & particularly the one I sent to you. Too, you won’t hold against me my sentimentality, expressed on the back-side – please, sweet? All in all, it’s merely a little remembrance I wanted you to have – and you will remember me because of it, won’t you?
Well, here’s the little surprise—and the unveiling of a minor mystery.
Mom had a box of various family keepsakes—diplomas, graduation programs, diplomas and certificates, photos, some letters, and so on. Among them was a little gift card, still in its original envelope; Mom had written a note on the card, addressed to Dad in the army.
I’d gone through that box scores of times, sifting through the odds and ends, but I had no idea what the card had been for—whatever the gift had been wasn’t specified in the note—until I reread that letter. I had just left the card in the box and filed it away in my memory.
When I read Mom’s letter again, I immediately recognized that the little card was connected and ran right off to the memento box and pulled it out. I still don’t really understand why I had kept it!
The tiny envelope for the card was addressed to “Capt. E. M. K*****, 0-1165639.” The note said essentially the same thing in nearly identical language as Mom’s letter (except it didn’t say that the gift with which it was enclosed was the bracelet), closing with: “Lots of luck, sweet – Hope you don’t mind wearing this – Love – Me.”
Apparently, ID bracelets for men were very popular at that moment, and Dad didn’t have one. (I don’t know if Dad wore the bracelet while he was overseas, but he did confide to me years later that he didn’t really like wearing one.)
I also had the bracelet, itself. It had been in Dad’s jewelry case when he died in 1996 and it was one of the mementos Mom gave me from Dad’s tchotchkes. It’s sterling silver with a “curb chain” band; on the front of the identification plate, Mom had “GENE K*****” inscribed and on the back, she put “JUDY 1 - 1 - 45,” the date they met.
Mom, by the way, didn’t actually say she’d put the date of the party on the back. That’s what she called “my sentimentality, expressed on the back-side.” I’d forgotten that she had “JUDY 1 - 1 - 45” engraved on the back of the ID plate. (Of course, I knew to what that referred; that was no mystery.)
(Half a century later, when Dad got Alzheimer’s, Mom had their telephone number engraved below Dad’s name on the front of the bracelet. Dad had started wandering off, mostly within the apartment building, but not everyone knew who he was, so Mom had him wear it again.)
Now, I knew that the bracelet had been a gift from Mom to Dad, though I either never knew or had forgotten that it was something she’d sent him when he was deployed to Europe during the war. I also never connected the gift card to the bracelet until I reread that letter.
In an 8 April letter, in reference to Mom’s March note, Dad wrote: “As for the bracelet, I anxiously await its arrival. Not at all for its intrinsic worth, but rather because it comes from you.” In response, Mother wrote back nine days later: “Further about the bracelet; you ought to be receiving it sometime soon – I hope so – & also that you will like it.”
In a letter of 30 April, a month-and-a-half after Mom sent her letter announcing the coming gift, Dad reported that he’d received a backlog of a bunch of letters from home . . . and one package:
The package was, of course, your bracelet which is most attractive physically but priceless sentimentally. The name and the date on the back (such a momentous date) should have been placed on the front and fitted with neon lights so that they partially burn as brilliantly (but never as contin[u]ously) as they do in my mind and heart.
(It’s irrelevant for two reasons—one, it has nothing to do with the point here; two, Dad wouldn’t have known of it until the next day—but 30 April 1945, the date of Dad’s letter above, was the day that Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker. The news wasn’t released worldwide until 1 May.)
In a letter dated 8 May, Mom exclaimed that “today is V-E day!!” (That’s “Victory in Europe Day” for you youngsters out there. It marks the official surrender of Germany for the Western allies; in the former Soviet nations, VE Day is marked on the 9th because of the time difference between western and eastern Europe.)
In the letter, Mom also addressed Dad’s receipt of the belated gift:
Delighted to know you got the bracelet; and more, that you enjoyed receiving it! I had hoped it wasn’t against your principals [sic] to wear such ornaments – and now am hoping that you’re not wearing it merely as a favor to me. (Say no more!!)
The surrender of Germany ended the war in Europe, signaling the imminence of Dad’s return stateside—except that he became involved in the Occupation as a Nazi-hunting Counter Intelligence Corps officer. (He spoke German and had received intelligence training at Camp Ritchie, the Military Intelligence Training Center; see “‘Ritchie Boys: The Secret U.S. Unit Bolstered by German-Born Jews that Helped the Allies Beat Hitler’” by Jon Wertheim [19 May 2021].)
Dad returned to his artillery duties on 8 June and was sent to Marseilles on 28 July to oversee the loading of the battalion’s guns and heavy equipment for transshipment to the Pacific. He waited there, detached from his battalion, until 22 August—through the atomic bombings of 6 (Hiroshima) and 9 (Nagasaki) August and the 15 August surrender of Japan, ending the war in the Pacific.
That meant his Liberty Ship was no longer bound east, and he landed in New York on 7 September. He never rejoined his artillery unit, which came home after he’d left France, and he never saw any of his former comrades, who were sent somewhere else, again.
After a two-month leave at home, he reported to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, on 1 November to wait out his final weeks of active service until he was separated on 4 December. Dad returned home and, having proposed to his girl when he’d been there on leave, married my mother in Trenton on 6 January 1946.
After a honeymoon in Miami and Havana, the newlyweds settled in Washington, D.C., where Mom’s father had gotten Dad a job in his newest acquisition, District Theaters Corporation. Except for a five-year stint with the United States Information Agency in Germany in the early and mid-’60s (see “An American Teen in Germany” [9 and 12 March 2013]), my parents lived the rest of their lives and raised a family in the Nation’s Capital.
The bracelet discovery—discoveries—was really just dumb luck more than any thoroughness on my part. (The dumbest luck was not having thrown away the gift card, since I’d had no idea what it was; I just let it sit in the box!)
It’s not so astonishing that I connected Mother’s letter to the bracelet I had in my jewelry box—her description of the gift was a pretty broad clue. It could have been a different bracelet, I suppose, so I guess it was a bolt of inspiration—or realization. That I linked the letter to the note card was serendipitous. however.
Sadly, both my parents were gone by the time I made this find, so I was never able to tell them about it. I did tell some family members and close friends, mostly from my generation (I’m the oldest member of my family left—on both my father’s and my mother’s sides), but none of them seemed quite as excited as I was at the little discovery.
In any case, Mom’s March 1945 letter, the gift card, and the identification bracelet are now all together again after maybe more than 70 years (calculating to 2016, when I started the work on the letters project). Figuratively speaking, of course. I’ve clipped the gift card to the page in the scrapbook with the letter, but the bracelet is in my jewelry box now. Still, now they’re all where someone—me—knows where they are—and what they are—for the first time since Dad had them all in Bergisch Gladbach, Germany, in April 1945.
[I made many small discoveries from rereading my parents’ wartime letters, but the others were all merely facts; this is the only one that involved artifacts. For instance, I always thought Dad was in Germany and at the Rhine when the Bridge at Remagen (the Ludendorff Bridge) collapsed into the river. But that was on 17 March 1945, just six days after his unit landed in France. His letters don’t mention this momentous event—and his battalion didn’t cross the Rhine until 12 April. The next day, it was 60 miles northwest of Remagen.
[I also thought that Dad’s artillery battalion had orders for the Pacific after Germany surrendered, but that the atomic raids and Japan’s surrender occurred while Dad, alone with the guns and heavy equipment, was en route to the PTO and that his ship was redirected to the States, where he cooled his heals waiting for his separation orders. (Family lore had it that Dad’s mother quipped that the Japanese heard that her son was on the way to the Pacific and that’s why they surrendered.)
[It turned out that orders for the Pacific Theater were never cut and Dad, who was alone on the ship with the unit’s equipment, didn’t depart Marseilles until after all the events ending combat with Japan had occurred, and sailed directly for New York.
[As for my mother, I knew she’s wanted to go overseas, the reason she graduated early from college and joined the Red Cross. That she never did, I always believed was because her father had put the kibosh on Mom’s plans. It turned out that when she was accepted for overseas duty, Mom, herself, backed out—her father had not raised an objection—because Dad was on the verge of leaving Europe, and she couldn’t accept the likelihood that he’d return to the States (or be shunted to the Pacific Theater) just as she was heading abroad for who-knows-how-long.
[Speaking of Mom’s early graduation from college, which I’d known about forever—but I didn’t know all the details. I didn’t know, for instance, that she didn’t get her diploma in September 1944, when her degree was conferred. (My masters degree was awarded in September instead of the previous May due to a credit malfunction, so I didn’t attend the September ceremony. The diploma was mailed to me, however.) Mom obviously got her sheepskin because it’s among the family papers I have, but what I hadn’t known until I reread the letters was that she made a special trip, with her folks, to Elmira, New York—a 250-mile, 7½-hour train ride from Trenton—for the graduation ceremony of her senior class in May 1945 to collect the certificate (and celebrate with her classmates).
[Outside the letters, but pursuant to my work on them, I did some research on Mom’s studenthood at Elmira College. According to the Elmira College Bulletins of 1943-44 and 1944-45, Mom majored in sociology-psychology, and graduated as a “Scholar of the Second Rank” with an 86-89% grade average (equivalent to a 3.44-3.56 GPA on a 4-point system). I never knew either of those factoids.
[There’s one similarity between this discovery and one other: that I made it after Mother’s death so I wasn’t able to tell her about it. As I reported above, Mom was a native New Yorker but moved to New Jersey with her family when she was very young. They still used to drive into the city often for visits, family events, and holidays. One of those occasions was Thanksgiving and they drove in through the Holland Tunnel in lower Manhattan.
[Mom said she remembered seeing kids downtown—in lower Greenwich Village—all dressed in costumes like Halloween, but she couldn’t remember what it was all about. I had no idea what Mom could have been recalling and I also had no idea how to look up something like that.
[Well, I was reading the New York Times in October 2016, in an “F.Y.I.” column, a feature that that fielded questions from readers about the New York metro area, responded to a question about this very activity—and the answer was all about “Ragamuffin Day.”
[I now had something to look up, so I did, and I found that this was precisely what Mom had been remembering. I blogged about Mom’s query and the discovery in “Ragamuffin Day” (26 November 2016), but I was disheartened that, like the ID bracelet find, I couldn’t call Mom, who’d died a year-and-a-half before, and tell her I’d found the answer to her mystery.]
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